Objective reality based on divine blessing, NOT subjective feeling . in other words- these are about God’s actions, not how the poor/meek/oppressed/etc feel.

Should not be translated as happy

Indicative

descriptive of those focused on the Kingdom of God

Ethical - community changes in reaction to the indicative declaration

Unconditional - there is no condition for blessing (not “if x then Blessed”)

Prophetic pronouncement based on the authority of the speaker.

Eschatological, not historical - they are tied to a future event

Subject is not nine distinct groups but a blessing on the authentic Christian community

First 8 beatitudes are split into 2 groups of 4. The first four are related to suffering and the last four are related to actions.

Marks of the Christian Community - Physical and Spiritual

Poor - awareness of our own need

new age “mindfulness” or “emptying”

Mourn - awareness of the injustice and suffering in the world

See Isaiah 61:2-3

Meek - those who are humble and vulnerable

Hunger and thirst - called to fight for justice, people of hope

Merciful - share in God’s grace given to all, concrete acts

Pure in heart

Peacemakers

Persecuted - “If a gospel is preached without opposition it is simply not the gospel which resulted in the cross. In short, it is not the gospel of love.” Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic.

Insulted, persecuted because of Jesus - if this isn’t happening - are we doing it right? - rejection of vengeance

Preaching Thoughts and Questions:

Are we living “Blessed” lives or are we doing everything we can to avoid being “Blessed”?

are and will - the two verbs of Beatitudes can’t have the will without the are

When was the last time you blessed your congregation? Are we waiting for perfection?

“Situated between two seaports. It was a place where traditions converged, where various languages were spoken and ideas were exchanged as eagerly as money for exotic goods.Corinth also had more than its share of corruption and vice: the disparity between rich and poor was painfully evident and, as one might expect under such circumstances, prostitution was rampant. In the first century, Corinth was where fortunes were made and where more than a few lives were sacrificed in the process.”

Wisdom and Foolishness

Passage contains both universal truth and particular application

Corinthian church must have been diverse. Evidence that while most Christians were poor and uneducated, not all were.

What do our churches look like? The makeup of many mainline, middle class congregations is the opposite - mostly comfortably wealthy, with some poor mixed in.

Truth remains, “God did not choose you because you deserved to be chosen. God chose those who are undeserving, by the world’s logic, in order to confound the logic of the world.” Beverly Gaventa, Texts for Preaching, Year A, p. 124

Is there room for intellectualism in the church? Or do

God’s wisdom is different than the world’s wisdom

“Paul asserts that the cross of Jesus Christ reveals the power of God. While for Christians some twenty centuries removed from Paul, and accustomed to the cross as a symbol in churches and even in jewelry, this assertion may seem inoffensive, it must have struck some of Paul’s contemporaries as the ravings of a madman. The cross was, in fact, the antithesis of power - except as it revealed the power of the Roman Empire to crush those regarded as opponents.” Beverly Gaventa, Texts for Preaching, Year A, p. 123

“The message that a convicted felon was the bearer of God's forgiving and transforming love was hard enough for anybody to swallow and for some especially so. For hellenized sophisticates-the Greeks, as Paul puts it - it could only seem absurd. What uglier, more supremely inappropriate symbol of, say, Plato's Beautiful and Good could there be than a crucified Jew? And for the devout Jew, what more scandalous image of the Davidic king-messiah, before whose majesty all the nations were at last to come to heel?Paul understood both reactions well. "The folly of what we preach," he called it (1:21), and he knew it was folly not just to the intellectually and religiously inclined but to the garden variety Corinthians who had no particular pretensions in either direction but simply wanted some reasonably plausible god who would stand by them when the going got rough.Paul's God didn't look much like what they were after, and Paul was the first to admit it. Who stood by Jesus when the going got rough, after all? He even goes so far as to speak of "the foolishness of God" (1:25). What other way could you describe a deity who chose as his followers not the movers and shakers who could build him a temple to make Aphrodite's look like two cents but the weak, the despised, the ones who were foolish even as their God was and poor as church mice?”

Preaching Thoughts and Questions:

What is the folly that we must preach? In the midst of American Civil Religion, it is imperative to reclaim the foolishness of the Gospel.

What does the world reward? The system of the world has created a situation where 85 people have as much material wealth as 3.5 billion combined. Where is the wisdom in such a system?

Sometimes the only way to be a disciple of Jesus is to do that which makes no sense. Do the beatitudes make any sense? Does Jesus teaching make sense? Does an empty tomb make sense? Do grace, mercy, and justice make sense?